I’m a strong believer in “fix bugs first” - especially in the modern age of “always be deploying” web apps.
(I run a small SaaS product - a micro-SaaS as some call it.)
We’ll stop work on a new feature to fix a newly reported bug, even if it is a minor problem affecting just one person.
Once you have been following a “fix bugs first” approach for a while, the newly discovered bugs tend to be few, and straight forward to reproduce and fix.
This is not necessarily the best approach from a business perspective.
But from the perspective of being proud of what we do, of making high quality software, and treating our customers well, it is a great approach.
Oh, and customers love it when the bug they reported is fixed within hours or days.
Would love to work on a project with this as a rule but I am working on a project that was build before me with 1.2 million lines of code, 15 years old, really old frameworks; I don't think we could add features if we did this.
Same. The legacy project that powers all of our revenue-making projects at work is a gargantuan hulking php monster of the worst code I’ve ever seen.
A lot of the internal behaviors ARE bugs that have been worked around, and become part of the arbitrary piles of logic that somehow serve customer needs. My own understanding of bugs in general has definitely changed.
Yes indeed, and also the title promise - I looked forward to read how the personal blogs are back, only to discover the author didnt provide any evidence, but not even examples. Maybe they are indeed back, if we count Substack newsletter archive as a "personal blog".
If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is.
And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.
Been using gitkraken for ages and still like it, but they do make it harder and harder to like every update. The enshittification seems to have started and every update seems to bring more and more ai features, and pushing more ”cloud” features as well
Off-topic, but unlike the example pricing plans, don’t make your SaaS’s “standard” plan $10/month. If you want a place to start, start with $50/month.
Or, as Patrick McKenzie used to tell us over and over, “charge more”.
(Yes, yes, I know some situations, customers, product, thinking, etc are different. But with broad brushstrokes, my advice is to not even entertain such a low price.)
This is such a broad generalization as to be useless. I use several pieces of software that are around $10/month which there’s no way in hell I would pay $50 for.
I'm not writing from the POV of a consumer of software. I'm writing from the POV of a seller of software.
If you are selling software, don't be the person charging $10/month. It's hard to make that business work.
Be the person charging $50/month. It's still hard - any business is - but it's much easier to make a software business financially viable if you charge decent money.
Which leads me to another piece of advice: don’t do B2C. Sell to businesses who will be far more willing to pay higher prices, will churn at a lower rate, and will - in general - require less support.
> The traffic is hitting numbers that require me to re-negotiate my contract with CloudFlare and is otherwise a nuisance when reviewing analytics/logs.
It's having negative financial repercussions now. It's not ignorable anymore.
These videos by Tantacrul are sooooo good to watch, from the perspective of making product decisions for a software product. They are really well made, too
https://www.myperfectconsole.com/
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